THE SHAME

The wife of a college professor, Alma spends her days tending to their fairy tale–like Vermont farmhouse and raising Eden and Phin, making sure their furnishings are a bit shabby chic and their days are spent mostly outside, limiting screen time and creating meals from their garden and chicken coop. From the outside, Alma is a picture-perfect version of the organic goddess extolled by Instagram influencers. She’s even an artist who dabbles in painting neo–Bloomsbury Group scenes. She considers writing and illustrating a children’s book with a rather lucrative contract but frets over the environmental waste inherent in the project—after all, how many of these books will be printed? Who will even read them? In her spare time, precious hours stolen in the nighttime while her family sleeps, Alma is working on a book that will show she's a serious artist. A meditation on the myths about maternal domestic work, Alma’s book will star a woman she calls Celeste, who will rise above all of the lies to become the perfect mother. She models Celeste on a woman whose social media accounts offer Alma a window into the life she desires. And somewhere along the line, Alma becomes alarmingly obsessed with the fake Celeste. Goodman devastatingly charts Alma’s anxieties about being a good-enough mother, a good-enough spouse to take to cocktails and dinner with colleagues, a good-enough advocate of all the trendy issues, including climate change and gun control, public versus private schools, organic versus micronutrient-dense foods. The tension builds, pushing Alma to plan her escape, but her journey forces her to face reality outside the filters afforded by social media.

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